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Reviewing campaign notes

Since the last time I collected my current Blade & Crown campaign notes into a PDF, they have (of course) only grown. I recently completed a re-read of them. It was very instructive, as well as fun.

This time, I didn’t bother to reformat or typeset the document, so the PDF was 82 pages long. 82 pages! And that’s with very terse text. Again, it’s easy to imagine that writing it out in more descriptive prose could be a full novel, or series of novels.

As I was going, I kept another document of notes on it. I ended up creating a high-level summary of the general course of things. Which NPCs are doing what? What’s been happening off-stage as the PCs have been having all their adventures?

The summary document ended up being three pages long, again with pretty dense text. I feel like I need a summary of the summary!

But writing it up really got the creativity going. I easily came up with a list of a dozen ideas for future campaign events. Either threads that were already dangling and unresolved, or possible side-events that might find their way into the spotlight in interesting ways. Over the course of the campaign, I’ve often managed to find interesting third ways for events to go. These third ways often suggest interesting side-stories: “Wait, Baroness Sermae did it that way? When the obvious course of action would’ve been to do A, or at least B? She did C? Huh, there must be a story behind that…” Those back-stories automatically just naturally produce interesting game happenings.

A campaign that runs multiple years ends up laboring under a lot of history. But much of that labor is in the form of planting campaign seeds for future happenings.